January 2009 Archives

Here is yet another, rather nice, example of performing arts education setting out to make a difference to teenagers. Cora Greenwood, 25, is a playwright with a ‘quietly confident’ mission to establish a voice for black women in British drama. She wrote Kinky Hair for radio which was serialised on BBC WM in four parts in 2006. She has also produced a film for Birmingham City Council on what it is like to grow up in care.

Now she is going into West Midlands schools to run script writing in workshops - in partnership with volunteers from Sandwell’s vflex project which exists to encourage 16-25 year olds to help improve life in the community.

Picture shows Cora Greenwood (on right) with youth volunteer Kelly McGeough.

Arriving at the Arcola (the trendiest venue in North London?) on Saturday I was immediately introduced by my PR contact to Sir Arnold Wesker - longest surviving Angry Young Man? He claims, aged 76, not to be angry. ‘Just grumpy,’ he told me with a twinkle having just travelled to Dalston from Hove where he ‘winters.’

Wesker and I were both there to see twenty plays written by Hackney primary school children - Quicksilver’s Primary Voices project which I blogged about a couple of weeks back. What a treat! Plato’s Cave by Gertrude Gibbons of Benthall Primary, for example, was extraordinarily sophisticated. It managed to send up the Famous Five genre, the notion of a five minute play and fairy stories (with a Grecian twist) in less than ten minutes. Remember where you first heard Gertrude’s name.

Primary Voices at the Arcola Theatre. Photographer: Iain Daddy

As Wesker told the young writers (and golly, didn’t some of them look tiny) at the end when they came up at curtain call: ‘I’ll be honest. When I agreed to come and see the plays I thought I was in for an afternoon of childish stuff. Instead you’ve given us polished works of imagination, fantasy and humour. Warmest congratulation to you all.’

How heartwarming to hear of an arts education project working not with the usual target child, teenage or ‘community’ participants, but with a group which really does usually get excluded, overlooked and forgotten: women travellers.

Royal Albert Hall Learning and Participation has got together with Purcell School to make it happen. The aim is to create a for-now version of Carmen, because the similar Tosca project went so well last year.

The Traveller Women’s group from Ealing is working with playwright Darren Rapier and poet, Ian McMillan in a series of writing workshops. Today for example Ian McMillan ran a ‘Masterclass’ with the Traveller women. Meanwhile Purcell School students are busy are creating five new pieces of music.

The new work, Carmen Revised, gets a rehearsed reading by a cast of TV and stage actors on Monday 2 March 2009 at the Royal Albert Hall, accompanied by the Purcell School music performed by the Hall’s newly created Learning and Participation resident ensemble, Albert’s Band.

Photograph of Whiter Than Snow by Robert Day

Graeae - the wonderful and highly respected organisation which describes itself as ‘a disabled-led theatre company which profiles the skills of actors, writers and directors with physical and sensory impairments’ - is about to start a splendid new outreach programme for 10-14 year olds. And it’s a really worthwhile development.

It’s always good to hear of theatre companies making things happen in primary schools. Hackney-based Quicksilver has long been strong on working with the youngest children but has concentrated even harder on what co-artistic director Carey English calls its ‘participatory arts programme’ since the threat (followed by an eleventh hour reprieve) to ACE funding last year.

Primary Voices is a project (launched in 2006) which enables children in eight Hackney primary schools to write plays, the best of which will be professionally staged and showcased at Arcola Theatre on 24 January.

Last autumn a director with two actors ran two workshops, a fortnight apart, in 10 Year 6 classes across the eight schools. The first shows the children how to write a scene with stage directions, characters and dialogue. They watch actors working, script in hand and realised that writers - even at age 10 - can make professional actors do what they want.

In 2006 I wrote a GCSE study guide for that hoary old Eng Lit examination favourite To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee I’d taught it to English groups many times and, of course, we always also watched and discussed the famous 1962 Robert Mulligan film which won a best actor award for Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch - and which, incidentally, provided more than one illustration for my study guide. Young people like To Kill a Mockingbird. It gets under their skin and changes their view of the world - which is why it’s worth studying.

But now of course - as well as GCSE and A Level English and drama we also have film studies which raises a film such as Mulligan’s Mockingbird to the status of ‘text’ in its own right.

Enter a series of education and training books which launched in 2008 from Methuen Drama entitled Screen Adaptations. They examine the ways in which books are interpreted on screen. The latest in the series - you’ve guessed it - is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird by R Barton Palmer. Given my relationship with Mockingbird you can imagine how I fell upon Barton Palmer’s book with glee and interest.

Why aren’t applicants for backstage jobs asked to demonstrate their skills practically rather than just presenting a CV and having a jolly chat aka an interview?

No director, venue, company or agent would consider hiring a performer without hearing/seeing him or her sing, dance act, juggle or whatever. In other industries a competence demo is quite usual too. If you apply for a teaching job in almost any mainstream school, for example, as well as being interviewed you will now also be expected to teach a class observed by selectors before a decision is made. No hairdresser will get a job without proving his or her prowess with the scissors. A parish appointing a new priest-in-charge usually wants to see the applicant take a service - among other things.

Yet lighting technicians, sound experts, stage managers and the like, unless they are already working in the company are generally taken on trust, instinct and hope - a pretty inexact and inefficient way of working when you think about it.

As I report in this week’s The Stage, 82% of last year’s 16 year old leavers from Sylvia Young Theatre School (SYTS) got 5 or more A* to C grades at GSCE including the crucial maths and English.

That puts the school academically streets ahead of most mainstream schools whose 2008 average was 47.2% (including English and maths). Yet SYTS students do all their academic work in just three days per week so that those precious two days are available at the end of each week for their specialist acting, singing and dancing work. Given that the school is academically non-selective (of course) and that some of the children have special needs it’s a remarkable achievement by any standards.

But, actually, it isn’t unique either. If you look at the other full time stage schools and the music and dance schools funded by means tested government grant to pupils you find a clear pattern. They nearly all turn out high level academic results as well as high calibre performers.

At Chethams School for Music in Manchester, for example, 100% of last year’s Year 11 got 5 or more A*-Cs (including English and maths) and the school achieves this almost every year. At Arts Educational School in London 100% of the girls and 79% of the boys did likewise.

Why is this? Surely it can’t be because performing arts-inclined youngsters are ‘brighter’? Hardly, given that the intake is usually academically very mixed. The only selection is for performing arts, music or dancing potential.